Can someone explain to me what Segment is and what it does? Even the website doesn't make it clear. What is it beyond analytics? Can someone clue me into why this is awesome or necessary? Am I dumb for not understanding this or a bad marketer?
Segment Is Now Free for Early-Stage Startups
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Re: Segment Is Now Free for Early-Stage Startups
#22Segment is amazing. The price point is ludicrous.
Re: Segment Is Now Free for Early-Stage Startups
#23If you run a business, I really don't understand the appeal of sharing a crucial part of your data (for web based applications / services) with a third-party (Google, Amazon etc. or maybe even Segments in the future) that may at some point compete with you ... especially when you can just parse your own web logs ...
Agreed. I'm starting to think that most of these analytics services are more trouble than their worth if you have a good engineering team. A few metrics API's + timescale DB + Grafana goes a long way. If you have a differentiated business you're probably measuring something unique. And if you're measuring something unique then you're better off building your own analytics. Also, realistically most businesses are buil…
I am working on rolling out everything on k8s for this reason. I know the conventional wisdom of startups is to just pay for services and move on, but I found that we just keep running into walls of either expense or the need to customize stuff. By the time we learn how to use someone's proprietary setup and get it all integrated, we could have just spun up a container in our cluster to handle it. GKE and a couple lines of kubectl and helm are pretty powerful these days.
Re: Segment Is Now Free for Early-Stage Startups
#24Data volume-based pricing is a bit out of control across most analytics/data products. My company has been moving away from volume-based pricing to a feature/value-based model.
The big challenge is aligning data scale to company size/price.
I suspect Segment is trying to solve for this very problem with their price increases but at the expense of smaller business. The 'startup' program is a great way for them to keep the platform accessible to new businesses. I applaud them for that.
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Shameless plug: My company Indicative (https://www.indicative.com), a customer/behavioral analytics platform that integrates with Segment. We offer 1 billion events/user actions a month for free for Segment users, so that all companies, especially startups can start using data in bringing their products to market and without having to worry about data limits.
Re: Segment Is Now Free for Early-Stage Startups
#25Segment is a good concept but when they bumped their pricing up to ludicrous mode, it justified a small rewrite to reproduce their functionality in our back-end to drop them and we haven't looked back. No way i'll be going back to their service factoring that experience. Interested to see what the back-end of this 'free period' will cost for the startups who get in bed with them - $120 per month for up to 10k MAU and…
Same thing happened at a company I work at. We got a quote back from Segment, the price was ludicrous, so we rolled our own in a week or so. Increased our Azure bill a bit (500/mo), but still soooooo much cheaper than Segment.
Re: Segment Is Now Free for Early-Stage Startups
#26Can someone explain to me what Segment is and what it does? Even the website doesn't make it clear. What is it beyond analytics? Can someone clue me into why this is awesome or necessary? Am I dumb for not understanding this or a bad marketer?
its integrations. you drop one javascript snippet in there, and instrument the app with their sdk.
Want google analytics? add it in their UI and its there. Mixpanel? Click a button. Trying a new ad network? Click a button.
Basically, all these SaaS companies want some bits of your data and have some custom integrations.. instead of needing an engineer to implement it your marketing team can edit a UI. And you do it once, so you don't hit as many 'oops we forgot/implemented wrong conversion tracking for Random Service X'
None of it is that hard to do, but there's probably better things your engineer should be doing. Also, as the engineer whose done it, on the tenth marketing platform integration the engineering team will hate the marketing team.
Re: Segment Is Now Free for Early-Stage Startups
#27I have to say, a few years ago I was the world’s biggest Segment evangelist. My absolutely favorite analytics service, and for any web project I worked on, installing Segment was step 1. I ran it primarily on my own company’s site (100k visitors/month, most of whom were not monetized) and I think I paid them $79/month. Worth every penny as a router to send up to GA, Heap, and others. Their data warehouse became a wonderful adjunct part of my analytics stack (and maybe my bill went up to $200 or so when they added that.)
Then they changed their pricing so that bill became $1200 (per month!). Total insanity. When I did some consulting work for another startup that had even higher traffic numbers (150k-200k uniques) but was also very lightly monetized, I actually lost some serious political capital with the CEO when he saw the Segment price quote of nearly $2000 per month. He thought I was trying to fleece them.
Sorry guys. I think you’ve built a REALLY awesome product and I / similarly small businesses are clearly not the target demographic anymore, and I’m sure you’re now making metric boatloads of money from big enterprise customers who don’t care about a $20k annual bill for analytics, but man, it’s disappointing to be so priced out of what was once a great part of my toolkit.
Re: Segment Is Now Free for Early-Stage Startups
#28Can someone explain to me what Segment is and what it does? Even the website doesn't make it clear. What is it beyond analytics? Can someone clue me into why this is awesome or necessary? Am I dumb for not understanding this or a bad marketer?
its integrations. you drop one javascript snippet in there, and instrument the app with their sdk. Want google analytics? add it in their UI and its there. Mixpanel? Click a button. Trying a new ad network? Click a button. Basically, all these SaaS companies want some bits of your data and have some custom integrations.. instead of needing an engineer to implement it your marketing team can edit a UI. And you do it o…
You are describing google tag manager, not segment.
Re: Segment Is Now Free for Early-Stage Startups
#29I have to say, a few years ago I was the world’s biggest Segment evangelist. My absolutely favorite analytics service, and for any web project I worked on, installing Segment was step 1. I ran it primarily on my own company’s site (100k visitors/month, most of whom were not monetized) and I think I paid them $79/month. Worth every penny as a router to send up to GA, Heap, and others. Their data warehouse became a won…
Hey, just wanted to let you know that we're reading/listening and this is really helpful feedback. I'd love to do a phone call, and get your feedback on a few pricing/packaging changes we're working on. If you're willing, my email is ilya @segment.com
Re: Segment Is Now Free for Early-Stage Startups
#30I have to say, a few years ago I was the world’s biggest Segment evangelist. My absolutely favorite analytics service, and for any web project I worked on, installing Segment was step 1. I ran it primarily on my own company’s site (100k visitors/month, most of whom were not monetized) and I think I paid them $79/month. Worth every penny as a router to send up to GA, Heap, and others. Their data warehouse became a won…
Hey, just wanted to let you know that we're reading/listening and this is really helpful feedback. I'd love to do a phone call, and get your feedback on a few pricing/packaging changes we're working on. If you're willing, my email is ilya @segment.com
Since you’re here, I highly agree. Segment is awesome and I’d love to pay for it but I need to track entire lifecycle for customers, including their original acquisition. That means tracking anonymous web visitors, and that immediately puts Segment into the “whoa, it’s how much?!?” category for me.